Chapter 58: Loudly Announce, Quietly Act!

To create a 2D anime-style game capable of competing with Genshin Impact.

Is it hard?

To some smaller game studios in the industry, this isn’t even an issue.

After all, to them, making any kind of game has always been simple.

Whatever game is popular, just copy it!

When another studio releases a hit xianxia game, they churn out a similar wuxia game.

As long as the core gameplay is roughly the same, they’ll just tweak the story a bit and adjust the character models.

There’s always plenty of players—no need to worry about user acquisition.

If they happen to attract a few big spenders, the game won’t just survive—it’ll turn a profit.

Even if they don’t, the loss is minimal—just one game that flops.

In Xia Country, any game company or indie studio that hasn’t had a few flops on its record isn’t even worth mentioning in the industry.

As for other aspects, there’s no need to consider them at all.

Graphics?

A web game with “one hit = 999” damage? Who cares about graphics—players still flood in to spend money!

Story?

Auto-play rewards, gear dropping everywhere—doesn’t that feel better than spending hours to complete a single quest?

Then add PvP and a power ranking system—how could players resist spending?

Thinking this way, transitioning into anime-style games doesn’t seem so hard after all!

It’s just changing the art style from familiar realistic to more cartoonish.

Most importantly, the old crude “big legs” aesthetic won’t cut it anymore—you must dress them in all kinds of stockings; that’s the soul.

Of course.

These are just naive assumptions held by small game studios.

The top-tier and upper-tier game companies in Xia Country’s industry all know: creating a game that can rival Genshin Impact is not simple—it’s extremely difficult.

Leaving other factors aside, even just the cel-shading technique alone is a major technical barrier for the vast majority of game studios.

After Genshin Impact became popular, many studios internally analyzed the game.

They discovered that Genshin Impact largely uses a cel-rendering style, which has significant limitations.

The most obvious one: it’s hard to pack too much detail into textures.

This means achieving perfect details and refined characters requires far more polygon surfaces.

However,

the more polygon surfaces a model has, the greater the performance drain on players’ devices.

In Genshin Impact, even a basic character model exceeds thirty thousand polygon surfaces; some bosses surpass fifty thousand.

It’s not that fifty thousand polygon surfaces are inherently impressive.

Many modern realistic PC games already have character models exceeding one hundred thousand polygons.

Major console games can go beyond two hundred thousand.

But those are PC and console games…

Genshin Impact’s tech team must have found a completely new method to solve the problem of draining mobile device performance.

Otherwise, their approach wouldn’t be about making money—it would be about killing players’ phones.

Another issue is artistic foundation.

Across Xia Country’s entire game industry, artists with that level of skill are not nonexistent—but they’re extremely rare.

Although creating a 2D anime-style game to compete with Genshin Impact isn’t simple,

driven by the massive market potential, these challenges don’t seem insurmountable.